Bay area radicals are ideological robots

I always say, why waste good snarky writing? I posted a comment about the Bay Area Citizen / New York Times article glorifying the Israel-haters at Jewish Voice for Peace that I wrote about yesterday, and I think it’s worth repeating:

It never ceases to amaze me how concepts like peace, justice, fairness, self-determination, human rights, etc. can be appropriated in the service of a movement to deny those things to one tiny nation. 22 Arab nations, Iran, and lately Turkey, with hundreds of millions of people and huge petrodollar resources all doing their best to get the Jews out of the Mideast.

And in the name of the Palestinian Arabs, who have generally been treated far worse by those nations than Israel ever did!

Not to mention the absurdity of activists who are prepared to believe every antisemitic lie about Israel and Jews but just can’t see the oppression and murder of women, LGBT people, Christians, black Africans, Bahai, you name it, by the paragons of virtue that they support in Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, etc.

But after all, they are noble savages, oppressed third-world people of color, so you can excuse all that, can’t you? It can’t be racism when the racists define themselves as oppressed, right?

You Bay Area radical chic-niks are such idiots!

The thought process of these people is foreign to me. They are so deep in their Stalinist conceptual scheme that they can’t see the most obvious facts. Someone suggested that they are like people living in an Orwellian state where all of their inputs are controlled by the regime, and so they end up believing that war is peace, truth is lies, freedom is slavery, Hamas is liberation, the Muslim Brotherhood is democratic, etc.

I started watching a movie last night, “The Lives of Others,” about how the technologically sophisticated invasion of people’s lives, political and private — actually, the distinction goes away — can control thought as well as action. Possibly the East German society depicted in the movie was even more intrusive than Orwell’s imagined Oceania. People can be made to think anything, even when they should know better.

Of course the Bay Area JVP people — and Michael Lerner, Codepink, etc. — don’t live in such a regime, they live near one of the most beautiful and free cities in the USA, and they have access to all kinds of information. So the totalitarian control is imposed from within and by the tight circles that these people move in.

I suppose Communists in the 1930’s could read the Daily Worker and talk politics with other Party members. But they still might be exposed to the ‘bourgeois press’ if they weren’t careful. Today’s electronic media make it possible to totally wall oneself off from any but the most rigorously filtered ideological inputs. Just set your RSS reader to deliver you today’s Mondoweiss, Guardian and Counterpunch.

The result are ideological robots that are impervious to being told that they are contradicting themselves. For example, does ‘Queers for Palestine’ sound a little, er, queer, to you given that Hamas jails or even murders homosexuals, while Israel gives them refuge? Then read “Palestinian Queers for BDS.” Your head will explode, but theirs don’t.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 7th, 2011 at 3:42 pm and is filed under Jewish Voice for Peace. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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